No, Google Says, It Did Not Delete ‘Palestine’ From Its Maps

Supporters of the Palestinian cause denounced Google online this week for removing the word “Palestine” from Google Maps, but there was just one problem: The company said the word had never been there in the first place.

Even by the boom-and-bust standards of anger on social media, this tale spread quickly, spurred by statements of outrage from Palestinian advocacy groups, news stories and viral videos that included no comment from Google.

An online petition from March condemning Google (and insinuating its “two Jewish founders” removed the word “Palestine” because of their alleged ties to Israel) had collected more than 280,000 signatures by Wednesday, more than 180,000 of those since the day before. Angry tweets were sent and there were calls to boycott the company.

A hashtag, #PalestineIsHere, was born. But as far as Google Maps is concerned, it actually had not been.

“There has never been a ‘Palestine’ label on Google Maps, however we discovered a bug that removed the labels for ‘West Bank’ and ‘Gaza Strip,’ ” the company said in a statement. “We’re working quickly to bring these labels back to the area.” It is unclear if that bug played a role in spurring the online outrage.

Elizabeth Davidoff, a spokeswoman, said in an email that the company had also never used the label “Palestinian territories” on its maps. The bug affecting the words “Gaza Strip” and “West Bank” persisted on Wednesday, but when Google Maps functions properly both areas are labeled and separated from Israel by a dotted line to signify that their borders are not internationally recognized.

The word “Palestine” was recently removed from the local home page of the company’s search engine, but the reason was aesthetic, not political, Ms. Davidoff said. It was taken down to make space for an Olympics-themed Google doodle, a design that sometimes greets users, as were country-specific tag lines for every country in the world.

“There’s no Google-wide effort to remove Palestine or anything like that,” Ms. Davidoff said in an email. She said a GIF circulating online (and shared by the activist group Jewish Voice for Peace) that claimed to show a before-and-after image that proved the alleged deletion, was fake.

So, how did this happen?

Part of it is a by-now familiar dynamic on social media. People are inclined to believe claims that reinforce their pre-existing beliefs, especially if they produce an emotional response.

Kate Klonick, a resident fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, said the cycle of outrage on social media is “reactive, its emotional, its not particularly thoughtful, but it is satisfying in a lot of ways for people.”

And few issues are more emotionally fraught than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one of the most intractable and heated disputes in international affairs. The anger of Google’s critics was unlikely to be soothed by the facts of this case, Ms. Klonick said.

“If you were upset that you thought Google removed Palestine, it does not ameliorate your anger at all to find out they never had Palestine there to begin with,” she said.

Naomi Dann, a spokeswoman for Jewish Voice for Peace, said the claims about Google Maps gained traction in recent days in part because a journalist group, the Forum of Palestinian Journalists, criticized the company in a statement. (Ms. Dann also said the GIF her organization posted to Twitter was created by one of her colleagues.)

In the statement, the forum said it believed “what the Google search engine has done is part of an Israeli plan to propose the entrenchment of ‘Israel’ as the name of a state for generations to come and the abolition of ‘Palestine’ once and for all, and its erasure from any map.”

Emad Zakaria, who wrote the statement, said he heard the claim that Google removed the word “Palestine” from the website of a Palestinian organization in Lebanon whose name he could not remember.

“Anyone looking for Palestine on Google will not be able to find it,” he said.

Still, the initial source of the outrage remains a mystery.

The claims about Google had extra emotional weight because they involved a visual representation of Israel and Palestine, Ms. Dann said. “Maps have always been political, and the ways that borders are demarcated on them is always political,” she said.